Foxfire

Confessions of A Girl Gang

The time is the 1950s. The place is a blue-collar town in upstate New York, where five high school girls are joined in a gang dedicated to pride, power, and vengeance on a world that seems made to denigrate and destroy them. Foxfire is Joyce Carol Oates's strongest and most unsparing novel yet-an always engrossing, often shocking evocation of female rage, gallantry, and grit. Here is the secret history of a sisterhood of blood, a haven from a world of male oppressors, marked by a liberating fury that burns too hot to last. Above all, it is the story of Legs Sadovsky, with her lean, on-the-edge, icy beauty, whose nerve, muscle, hate, and hurt make her the spark of Foxfire, its guiding spirit, its burning core. At once brutal and lyrical, this is a careening joyride of a novel-charged with outlaw energy and lit by intense emotion. Amid scenes of violence and vengeance lies this novel's greatest power: the exquisite, astonishing rendering of the bonds that link the Foxfire girls together. Foxfire reaffirms Joyce Carol Oates's place at the very summit of American writing.

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Good psychological fiction and an interesting topic but the writing wasn't as compelling as I would have hoped for Joyce Carol Oates.

brianreynolds
Aug 22, 2012

In the tradition of Robin Hood Joyce Carol Oates’ Foxfire describes a saintly outlaw’s heroic quest for justice and equality against odds that are overwhelming. Delightfully modern in its prose, Oates creates a female teenage Shane who rides into a fictional upstate New York metropolis to rescue gender-oppressed women, redistribute wealth, and inspire hope among youth before she disappears in a sunset made more resplendent by her passing. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Yes, there is even a young girl standing at the roadside crying, “Don’t go, Legs. Don’t go” as the dust settles. Is Foxfire grittier, grimier, gutsier that its Sherwoodian-Westernian predicessors? One would hope so since it belongs to us, to a world where toting firearms has become--even in Canada--a “right,” and the motiveless mass slaying of innocent humans seems to have become a weekly fact of our lives.

Great book. Had to read it for school but actually enjoyed it. It has an easy-to-read but engaging and different writing style. The story will have you cheering for the characters and then cursing some of their decisions! I have read it 3 or 4 times!